Play· 1600· Comedy
A Midsummer Night's Dream: 1 recorded work traces back to it, and it draws on 1 recorded source.
Works that record this one as a source, with the evidence a contributor gave.
Meyer has named A Midsummer Night's Dream, with The Merchant of Venice, as the plays behind Breaking Dawn. The debt is to the play's treatment of love as something that happens to people rather than something they choose, which is how the book handles Jacob's imprinting. Filed LOW: one book, and a theme rather than a plot.
The works this one is recorded as drawing on.
The play within the play is Ovid. Pyramus and Thisbe, performed by the mechanicals in the last act, is a tale from the fourth book of the Metamorphoses, and Shakespeare plays it as farce. The frame is Ovidian too, and more deeply. Bottom is given an ass's head and is still himself inside it, which is the Metamorphoses' whole subject: a body changed by a power that is not interested in consent, and a mind left to cope. Elizabethan schoolboys read Ovid in Latin, and Shakespeare is quoting a text his audience knew.